Outpost

by Adam Baker

  Outpost

  Adam Baker

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Adam Baker 2011

  For Helen

  Table of Contents

  Rampart

  Part One

  Fat Girl

  Outbreak

  The List

  Fragile

  Mayday

  Rescue

  Survival

  Dealing

  The Crater

  The Hatch

  Contamination

  The Hunt

  Fire

  The Long Game

  Lifeline

  Part Two

  Hyperion

  Power

  Infection

  The Engine Room

  Breakout

  The Wreck

  The Specimen

  Diary of Dr Elizabeth Rye

  The Body

  DSV

  The Voyage

  The Damned

  The Killer

  The Voice

  Army of the Damned

  Part Three

  The Refuge

  The Plan

  Hunger

  The Vault

  The Bomb

  Countdown

  Part Four

  The Final Hour

  The Pit

  The Hive

  The Race

  Departure

  Ghost

  Rampart

  The Barents Sea is so cold that if it were still for a day, if it were no longer churned by Arctic winds and ocean currents, it would freeze solid. You could walk across it. Shine a searchlight downward and illuminate the ice-locked dreamscape of the ocean floor. Ridges and canyons, silted wrecks, eyeless organisms that live and die in perpetual darkness.

  The Con Amalgam refinery Kasker Rampart is anchored a kilometre from the clustered islands of Franz Josef Land. A skeleton crew of fifteen haunt corridors and accommodation blocks that used to be home to a thousand men. Each day they perform desultory system checks then get stoned, watch TV, or stare out of a porthole at the bleak sun. They retreat into memory, navigate a landscape of nostalgia and loss, kill time until the day Con Amalgam reboot the platform and set the seabed pipeline pumping again.

  Part One

  Survival

  Fat Girl

  Jane woke, stretched, and decided to kill herself. If she hadn't found a reason to live by the end of the day she would jump from the rig. It felt good to have a plan.

  Jane jogged down service tunnels on C deck. Part of her morning routine. The walls and deck plates were autumnal shades of rust. The pipework throbbed like a heartbeat. Heating, sewage, desalination.

  Jane was fat. It often hurt to walk. She struggled to wipe each time she used the bathroom. It was the main reason she took a job on the rig. The gargantuan refinery would be her health farm. Six months sequestered from supermarkets and junk food restaurants. She would return to the world transformed.

  Each morning she put on her super-ironic, super-self-hating, PORN STAR shirt and shuffled a kilometre-long circuit through the metal labyrinth. She wore Lycra cycle shorts so her thighs didn't chafe. She wore a towel wadded down the back of her shorts to stop perspiration trickling into the crack of her buttocks. Her tracksuit hung wet and heavy.

  Jane used fire point fifty-nine as her finish line. A red locker full of breathing apparatus and extinguishers. Lung-bursting effort. The final stretch. She fell against the locker whooping for breath and fumbled for the Stop button of her watch with sweat- slick fingers. Fourteen minutes. She was getting slower. Barely faster than a walking pace. The first time she ran the route she flew fast and strong, but now her knees stung with each heavy footfall. She should rest for a few days, give her body a chance to recuperate, but she knew that if she broke her routine she might not run again.

  She usually followed her daily run with calisthenics, punished her disgusting body with a round of sit-ups and squat-thrusts, but this morning she was overcome by a strength-sapping wave of what's-the-point. She returned to her room and stripped out of her wet clothes. She showered. She soaped her barrel belly, kneaded fistfuls of dough-flesh. Her skin, usually mottled pink and white like the inside of a pork pie, blushed red under the heat of the shower jet.

  She towelled herself dry. She dusted the creases and folds of her body with talc and sprayed herself head-to-toe with deodorant. She avoided her reflection. She hated mirrors. Sagging breasts. Rolls of blubber as if her flesh were poured from a jug in gloops and folds like thick custard.

  She dressed. She clipped her dog-collar in place and headed for the chapel.

  The chapel was last in a row of retail units. Three years ago, when the refinery ran at full capacity, Con Amalgam provided a hairdresser, a general store and movie rental. Now the mall units were shuttered and padlocked. The remaining crew still called it Main Street.

  Jane unlocked the chapel and hit the lights. The chapel was a white room filled with metal chairs. Coloured wall lamps projected the illusion of stained glass.

  She took her cassock from a cupboard and wrestled it on.

  She began the service. She blessed empty chairs. She sang along to ''Classic Hymns of Worship'.

  She stood at the lectern and read her sermon. She read the same sermon every week. Sometimes she read it in a silly voice. Sometimes she read it backwards. Today she gave up halfway through. She folded each page into a paper plane and flew them across the room. She experimented with different wing designs to see if she could reach the back wall.

  'It's a tough job,' the bishop had said, as they sipped sherry in his study. 'You'll be away from home a long time. You’ll be mother to a thousand men. Deckhands. Brawlers. A tough crowd.'

  'My dad used to be a sailor,' said Jane. 'I can handle roughnecks.' But she couldn't handle irrelevance.

  Rampart used to be a busy town. Installation lights burned through the Arctic night as if a chunk of Manhattan broke loose and floated away. There was a cinema, a gym and a Starbucks. There was even a radio station. Three marshals kept order. There was no booze on the rig but tempers ran high. Long shifts and nowhere to go when they were done. Sometimes fights got out of hand. Marshals zapped the participants with a Taser and let them cool off in a holding cell.

  A deckhand job on an Arctic rig was like joining the Foreign Legion. Guys fled bereavement, addiction, all kinds of personal failure. Jane expected to nurse tough men through those midnight hours of heartbreak and loss. Let them talk it out in the privacy of the chapel. Send them home fixed and whole. Instead she found twilight and dereliction.

  'I can't understand why they sent you here,' shouted Punch, as he helped Jane lift her kit-bag from the supply chopper.

  Gareth Punch. Ginger goatee. Short and slight. Mid-twenties.

  'I suppose your Church didn't hear the place got moth- balled.' They ran from a typhoon of rotor-wash as the Sikorsky took off. 'Rampart hasn't been pumping for a year. The Kasker field is running dry. All the easy oil got sucked. Sooner or later the rig will get redeployed someplace like the Gulf of Mexico or sold to India for scrap. Dumb bureaucracy. Same wherever you go. Anyway. Hello.' He shook Jane's hand. 'Gary Punch. I'm the chef.'

  He showed Jane to the accommodation block. 'This is your room,' he said, 'but there are plenty of others if you want to switch. You have this entire block to yourself. Most of the crewmen meet for dinner in the canteen at seven. Other than that, people keep to themselves. Better get used to your own company, because this place is a ghost town.'

  Jane threw her cassock over a chair. She took a chocolate bar from a stash hidden behind a big Bible in the vestry cupboard. She perched on the altar and ate. She was useless, alone and unloved.

  She heade
d back to her room. It was a long journey down white corridors that receded to vanishing point. The refinery was so big some guys used bicycles to get around. The infirmary had a stretcher-car like a golf buggy. It was kept chained to stop the crew taking joyrides.

  She walked the route out of habit, but stopped by an exterior door when it occurred to her there was no reason to return to her room. Earlier that morning she had resolved to jump from the rig. Why wait until nightfall?

  She spun the hatch wheel and stepped into a quilted airlock.

  WARNING

  EXTREME COLD

  SAFETY CLOTHING AND TWO-MAN PROTOCOL

  AT ALL TIMES

  She heaved open the exterior door and the sudden shock of cold sucked breath from her body. Vicious wind-chill. Minus thirty and no coat. Her skin burned.

  Jane stepped out on to a walkway. Boot clang. Bleak daylight. A vast machine-scape. Massive storage tanks. Gantries, crossbeams and pipework dripped ice. A steel archipelago. One of the largest floating structures on earth.

  She leaned over a railing. She touched the iced metal for a moment then snatched her hand away like it had been scorched on a stove. She looked down. Far below, hidden by mist, was the sea. She could hear water lapping between the great floatation legs of the refinery. If she climbed the railing and allowed herself to topple forward it would be over in an instant. A hundred-metre drop through white vapour. The impact would smash her bones as if she hit concrete. Quick extinction, like an Off switch.

  She put one foot on the railing and willed herself to jump. She had been outside less than a minute, but was shivering as if in an epileptic seizure. Her vision blurred. She wanted to jump but couldn't do it. Muscle lock. Too scared of falling. Too scared of pain. She went back inside and stood beneath a corridor heat vent. She cursed her cowardice. She plucked a frozen tear from her cheek and watched the little jewel liquefy between her fingers.

  Plan B: retreat to her room and swallow a fatal overdose of painkillers.

  Jane had been collecting painkillers for the past couple of months. Each time she bought deodorant or gum from the table in the canteen she took a packet of paracetamol. The pills were in a bag beneath her bed.

  She stopped at the canteen kitchen to collect a tub of ice cream. The steel door of the refrigerator rippled her face like a funhouse mirror.

  Accommodation Block Three. Long passageways. Empty stairwells.

  Each crew member was assigned a small cell with a bed and a chair. They got a clothes locker, a washstand cubicle and a metal toilet. A scratched Perspex porthole allowed Jane a view of the basalt cliffs and jagged crags of Franz Josef Land. Desolate, lunar terrain. Volcanic crags dusted with snow. In a few weeks the sun would set and the long Arctic night would begin.

  'Hi, honey. I'm home.'

  She stripped, sat on the bed and popped pills from their foil strips. She piled the tablets on the blanket until they formed a little white mound. She mashed the pills into a tub of Cookie Dough. She wanted to write a note but couldn't think what to say.

  She opened her laptop. She wanted to hear a familiar voice. She selected an old message from home. A cam clip. Jane's sister, sitting in a sunlit room. Jane clicked the Play arrow.

  'Hi, Janey. How are things at the top of the world? Just wanted to say hello and tell you how proud we are of what you are doing. Can't imagine what it must be like up there. It must be tough looking after all those guys. Or maybe you are enjoying a bit of male attention. Fighting them off with a chair. Anyway, Mum sends her love . . .'

  If she were home, she might pick up the phone and reach out for help. But the only contact with the mainland was the microwave link in the installation manager's office. An open line with a stilted, two-second delay.

  Jane scooped pills and ice cream, and sucked the spoon clean. Bitter. She grimaced. She scooped more painkillers. She didn't want to lose consciousness before she ate enough pills to kill herself outright. She didn't want to wake. For once in her life, she would do the job right.

  Ice cream. A sweet kiss goodnight. It would be a meek, apologetic death. She consoled herself with the thought that, in these final moments, she would be communing with countless lifelong losers who extinguished the world with a glass of Chablis and a bellyful of painkillers.

  She was about to swallow a third mouthful of tablets when there was a knock at the door. She quickly shut off her laptop. A second knock. Must be Punch. No one else knew where to find her.

  'Hello? Reverend Blanc? Are you in there?'

  Jane sat still as she could.

  'Reverend?'

  Jane wondered if it might be easier to answer the door and get rid of him. Claim she was ill. Tell him to come back later. Much later.

  Punch tried to open the door but it was locked from the inside by a plastic dead bolt like a toilet cubicle.

  'Reverend? Hello?'

  Jane spat pills and ice cream into a tissue. She put on a dressing gown and opened the door.

  Punch in a mad, Hawaiian shirt.

  'Sorry. Sleeping.'

  'Rawlins sent me to get you. He wants to talk to everyone in the canteen right away.'

  Jane sagged against the doorframe for support.

  'Reverend? Are you okay?'

  Jane bent double and vomited over his shoes.

  Punch helped Jane to her feet. He saw the pill packets on her bunk.

  'Oh, Christ.'

  He helped Jane crouch over the toilet bowl. She vomited ice cream, then she vomited chocolate, then she vomited green stuff she didn't recognise. She sat panting on the floor.

  Punch counted the tablets to see how many she had swallowed.

  'I suppose you'll be all right,' he said. 'We should get you to Medical.'

  'Fuck that,' said Jane.

  Punch rinsed his shoes under the tap.

  'Promise you won't tell anyone,' she said.

  'Let's get you up.'

  He helped Jane to her feet. He waited in the corridor while she dressed.

  'How do I look?' she asked.

  'Wipe your eyes.'

  'What does Rawlins want?'

  'I don't know, but it sounded serious.'

  Outbreak

  Crewmen sat in a semicircle round the plasma TV in the canteen. Roughnecks. Bearded frontiersmen. Oil trash. They watched BBC News bounced by Norsat in geostationary orbit over Greenland.

  Ridgeback armoured cars parked outside hospitals. Gas-masked soldiers manning checkpoints and barricades. Desert-yellow vehicles blocking each high street like an occupying army.

  Helicopter footage of gridlocked traffic. Motorways at a standstill. Family cars jammed with suitcases, furniture lashed to the roof.

  A food riot. Supply trucks stormed by refugees. Rifle butts. Warning shots. Sky News correspondent in a flak jacket:

  '...approached the tent city and were literally overrun by hundreds of desperate families that haven't eaten for days. The troops are struggling to contain the situation, but as you can see . . .'

  'Martial law, of sorts,' explained Rawlins, the installation manager. 'Some kind of outbreak.'

  Rawlins was a burly guy with a white Santa Claus beard. His badges of office: a Con Amalgam cap, Con Amalgam insulated mug, and a big bunch of keys clipped to his belt.

  'When the fuck did this happen?' asked Nail, a diver with a bald head and bushy lumberjack beard. A huge man. Six-six. Massive biceps.

  'It's been building up for a couple of months. You lot were watching the Cartoon Network and blowing your wages on fucking PokerStars.'

  'Terrorists?'

  'No idea.'

  'Did they mention Manchester?'

  'I honestly can't tell you what on earth is going on.'

  'The supply ship is still coming, yeah?'

  'That's why I asked you here. The ship is coming a month early. That's the big news. Seven days, then we are out of here. Total evacuation. Pack our stuff and power down.'

  'We still get paid for a full rotation, right?'

  'Th
at's the least of your worries. The ship is due on Sunday morning. In the meantime if any of you want to use the ship-to-shore, if you're worried about relatives, then let me know. You can use my office. The signal is shaky but you are welcome to try.'

  Punch distributed coffee and sandwiches. The crew watched TV in silence. They wanted to see their home towns. Birmingham. Glasgow. York. Jane wanted to hear about Cheltenham but the news channels were running the same images over and over. Some kind of bloody plague was sweeping through the cities. Was it a bio-weapon? A spontaneous mutation? Nobody knew. Most of the footage was shaky phone clips mailed by viewers. Armed police suppressed supermarket riots. Gangs fortified tower blocks against intruders, declared them a city state. The Prime Minister called for courage, called on God. Studio pundits discussed Ebola, AIDS, haemorrhagic fever.

  Jane joined Punch in the canteen kitchen and helped grate cheese. A steel room. Counters, fryers, dishwashers and mixers. Smell of fresh bread.

  'How are you feeling?' asked Punch.

  'Okay,' said Jane.

  'Want to talk about it?'

  'Not really.'

  'All fucked up.'

  'The TV? I've seen snatches these past few days. I've been trying not to think about it.'

  'My mother lives in Cardiff,' said Punch.

  'The centre?'

  'Riverside.'

  They had glimpsed images of Cardiff on the news. Part of the town centre was burning. A department store caught alight and the fire spread building to building. Black smoke over the city rooftops. A church spire crumbled in a cascade of rubble dust. There were no fire crews left to respond.

  'She'll be fine,' said Jane. 'People know what to do in this kind of situation. Fill the larder, lock the front door and stay out of trouble.'

  'I should be there.'

  'Three days to Narvik. Four hours to Birmingham International.'